Here is a great festival followup that appeared on the website Austin360.com about the Off-Centered Film Fest....

Dogfish Head takes flight with films Cult beer is celebrated with drinking and movie watching at the Alamo Drafthouse.By Patrick Beach

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Do you love beer? Do you drink it, make it, cook with it? When you're sitting in a bar bedecked with dozens of intriguing taps on the wall, do you look with pity upon the unilluminated lad or lass quaffing a bottle of mass-produced, straw-colored American lager? Are you hoppy and you know it?

Then pull up a stool. This, the American-Statesman's new monthly beer column, will keep tabs (har) on Texas' vibrant and ever-changing beer scene, with its craft and microbreweries, homebrew clubs, brew pubs and at least one up-and-coming brewing co-op.

First up: A marriage of two of my favorite things in the world — the Alamo Drafthouses and Dogfish Head beers. Last week, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Lake Creek hosted the Delaware brewery's "Off-Centered Film Festival," with more than a dozen short films made specially for the festival, cheese and crackers from Central Market, beer-related menu specials and the exuberant personality of brewery founder and president Sam Calagione.

And flights of beer. Calagione brought a dozen Dogfish Head beers, including a few seldom seen in Texas. First up Thursday — a night of drinking, not film competition was the brewery's flagship, 60 Minute India Pale Ale, which is constantly hopped for a full hour, giving it a hoppy pull of 60 International Bittering Units sitting atop a firm foundation of grain. (That's roughly six times the IBUs of a Budweiser.) Calagione, wearing jeans, a Dogfish Head-Alamo T-shirt and a Rolex, talked about how he used one of those old electric football games with a vibrating playing field to slowly drop the hops into the boil for a test batch.

"Don't drive, because we're going on an odyssey of alcohol," Calagione told the house full of beer geeks at the outset. "It's going to be a beautiful thing."

The crowd then sampled the 90 and 120 Minute IPAs, the latter of which will run you about $10 for a single 12-ounce bottle, before moving on to the brewery's even more adventurous offerings including: Raison D'Etre, which is made with beet sugar and green raisins; Chateau Jiahu, said to be adapted from a 7,000-year-old Chinese recipe that includes honey, grapes, Hawthorne fruit and chrysanthemum flowers and tastes very much like a kind of beer prosecco. (Rumor has it that Dogfish Head brewers are at work on a test batch that will include fermented radial tires.) These wild beers don't push the envelope; they shred it.

In person, Calagione, like his beers, is an energetic presence. A good number of the offerings, such as Midas Touch and the sublime Red & White, challenge hopheads' assumptions about what is beer and what is wine. The latter, for example, is brewed in the style of a Belgian wit beer with coriander and orange peel, fermented with Pinot Noir juice. A fraction of the batch is aged in Oregon Pinot Noir and another on oak. The beer is then blended. The result is 10 percent alcohol by volume. These are sturdy and intriguing options all, with relatively high alcohol contents ranging from 6 percent for the 60 Minute to 18 percent for the raspberry-spiked Fort, which comes in a 750-milliliter champagne bottle.

There were a lot of queries for Calagione about how Dogfish Head, which takes its name from a place in Maine, develops yeast strains brawny enough to push alcohol contents toward 20 percent (the answer: push-ups) and why, oh, why this or that offering isn't available in Texas.

Calagione says he got the idea for moving the festival to Austin last April when he came to town for the Craft Brewers Conference & BrewExpo America, which included a screening of Paul Kermizian's 2004 bockumentary "American Beer" at the Alamo Lake Creek.

"Our philosophy tells that story that we're not trying to sell status quo beers and cater to a status quo audience. So when we last visited Austin, I felt like, holy (expletive), I'm home," Calagione said. "We felt like our company and their company should (get together). And you guys have such a great film community that it seemed like a no-brainer to pull up the tent stakes on our annual film festival."

Calagione said he's committed to making the two-night event annual. The films, 14 of them, were required to be five minutes or less and to contain some sort of Dogfish Head product placement. On Friday, Daniel Dunning's "Simple Things," the story of a robot's birthday, with Brian Reavey of Oregon and Reavey's brother Patrick of New York, took first place. Cash prizes went to the top three. A big local favorite was the Austin-shot third-place finisher "Elixir," which included a photographer asking a snake oil salesman if Dogfish Head might clear up her social disease. In addition to the films — many of them wildly amusing and inventive — Friday also included great specials on DFH brews Raison, Midas, Immort, Indian Brown, Burton Baton and Aprihop.

"We're all enamored of Dogfish Head beer," Brian Reavey said. "This is our first attempt at a submission, so we're batting a thousand."

Patrick Reavey also submitted his own film, which didn't win, place or show, but with the beer flowing he didn't claim any hard feelings.

"I was happy to lose to these two gentlemen," Patrick Reavey said.

When Thursday night was over, Paul Michie, the Alamo's food and beverage director, pronounced it a success but speculated that the number of samples might need to be tweaked.

"I don't know if we're going to do 12 beers any more because it's a little over the top," Michie said. "We're going to do 15."

Most every beer geek was on hand for the event, including representatives from Austin Homebrew Supply and the Black Star Co-op. The films were fun. The beers were amazing. Let's do it again next year, shall we?